In the End
by MaxRideObsessed
Summary: Even if it was the work of Lucifer, the demons, and all those evil forces around him that brought him to that battlefield, it was Dean who gave Sam the strength to win the battle in the end.


Most of the time, Sam Winchester wished he were someone else.

He wished he _were_ someone else. His father and brother would have said _I wish I was_. Because grammar didn't matter to the Winchesters. A lot of things didn't matter to the Winchesters.

In Nebraska, some nondescript town, his new friend Jacob was a demon. Sam didn't know he was a demon, so he wished he were Jacob.

Jacob didn't know how to defend himself, but he seemed perfectly healthy. He didn't know there were things out there, evil things, and he would probably never know, and he would probably grow up and get married and have kids and they'd all be happy and fine not knowing.

Jacob wasn't forced by his father to wear a turtleneck to school so that his favorite teacher wouldn't mistakenly call child services (or not so mistakenly, as Sam looked at it). Jacob didn't get shit from his brother every time he wanted to do anything after school other than stay home and sharpen knives and pack bullet shells with rocksalt.

Jacob wasn't raised with an insane sense of responsibility, like saving the world was all on his shoulders.

Sam didn't know that saving the world _would _eventually depend on him, so he hated his family for making him feel like it was. Like if someone somewhere got their heart ripped out of their chest by a werewolf while he tried out for a basketball team, it was somehow his fault. Because he should have been there because he was raised against his will to know what a werewolf was, to be able to melt silver into bullets, to have precise aim if somehow it had to be him to waste it.

Jacob didn't have that type of weight on his shoulders. Maybe that was the point of his demonic existence, to drive Sam crazy. But it worked.

Jacob wanted to come over to Sam's house. As a thirteen year old, Sam could feel the wrongness of saying yes even as he said it. But their father was gone, and if Sam could bribe or blackmail Dean properly it would never be spoken of again. He had plenty of dirt on Dean, that was for sure.

Like that time John had left to do a quick search of that haunted convent and had told Dean to watch Sam, except Dean got too involved in a phone conversation with Jessica "Blow" Jobs and Sam was halfway through a nasty fight with a spirit before Dean woke up from his blonde induced trance and shot it with his gun.

Sam never told their dad, but he made sure Dean knew he could, flashing the bruises on his arms every time Dean got particularly obnoxious.

So he told Dean that he wouldn't rat him out and would let him have the rest of Sam's rare ration of Ben and Jerry's, and Dean was silent. Even if he gave him a look that said that it was a horrible idea.

He shut up while Sam cleared the house of all the incriminating evidence and laid out his homework on the table as if he did it every day.

Sam forgot the pig's blood near the closet door, but when he panicked and went back minutes before Jacob was due to arrive, it was already gone, and when he glanced at Dean, his brother looked especially involved in his secret stash of porn.

And when Jacob left, cursing about Sam's messed up apartment (and his evidently messed up life), Dean didn't say a word, just watched tensely as Sam packed his half-finished homework away.

His eyes did seem to say, "If it's worth anything, I'm sorry we're freaks," but that might have just been wishful thinking on Sam's part. It could also have been, "I told you so."

Sam did notice, though, when he went to the freezer later for a frozen dinner, that his ice cream wasn't completely gone, which made him roll his eyes as much as it made him smile.

Because Jacob had been possessed, he'd probably been trying to make Sam hate his life even more - and it worked, to some extent. When the house was returned to its normal condition, Jacob was steadily ignoring Sam, and John came home, Sam's resentment had probably increased, just another degree towards boiling on his inner thermometer.

But two weeks later, Sam was pretty sure Dean remembered the incident when he dropped Sam off at the school dance with the promise that if Dad called he would swear that Sam was researching the recent string of deaths with him.

Sam remembers the shine of the newly washed impala as Dean drove off with a cursory look back at him. And he remembers the smile on his own face as he thought that maybe there really was someone in the world who was on his side.

And, now that Sam thinks about it, Jacob may have given him part of the strength he needed to jump in that hole.

Because yes, Sam wished he were someone else a lot of the time. But he had felt that way practically since he was capable of independent thought. That definitely wasn't because of Jacob, or, in reality, the demon who had pretended to be him. No, it had always been that way.

Sam might always have left for Stanford. No matter what, Jessica would probably have died and he would've ended up in that graveyard, with Lucifer "wearing him to the prom."

Yeah, Jacob, like a lot of others, made Sam wish he were someone else. But there was only one person who, on rare occasions, made him glad to be himself.

And maybe every demon that messed with Sam's head had done exactly what they were supposed to. Maybe they all led Sam to that battlefield. But maybe they also unknowingly gave Sam exactly what he needed to, yes, resent the weight in his shoulders, but also defeat it.

Sam wished he were someone else, but as long as he was him, he had his brother. He had learned that Dean would always be there, no matter what human or demon or ghost tried to screw with him. Somehow Dean had always tried to make things alright. 

And that, in the end, was probably what finally gave him the strength to be the one to tell Dean that everything would be okay, in the end.

It would all be okay.


End file.
